This is Speaking of Faith, first person. This online exclusive is part of repossessing virtue,

an ongoing series in which we search for fresh ways to think and talk about the current economic

crisis. I'm Rob McGinley Myers, associate producer of Speaking of Faith. Here I speak with An Chi

Min, a novelist and memoirist who grew up in Mao's China. Her most recent book is The Last Embrace.

So, An Chi Min, in what way do you consider this immoral or spiritual crisis of your own or of our cultures?

I consider that my own and the culture, I'm talking about American culture and as well as the Chinese

upcoming culture is a change to culture. It's kind of getting different from the past. Since now,

the new generation is raised by McDonald's and completely fried chicken. Everything changed.

I personally, I think, I give you an example, I'm very different from my daughter who is

born in Chicago. I'm an, I am an immigrant and a new American and I came to this country in 1984

and I don't have American sense of entitlement. This is what I see. That's the root of the things

because you just stay in America, you say you're beautiful, you can do anything. As long as you dream

hard, dream hard and work hard to get it. It's a very different concept. And I, in a lot of ways,

for the kids, now we are, we are chasing this problem to its roots. I think it's a collective

on failure of a responsibility that caused this economic downturn to happen. I think it started a

very young age because this is American. It's a flow of American education in a way that you,

you tell your kids that you can do anything you want, but you don't emphasize your responsibility

to make it happen. Right. One of the things that you grew up with was this idea of total sacrifice

in communist China and you have written about the horrors of that kind of sacrifice, but that

your daughter has experienced this very different American culture where instead of any kind of

sacrifice, what's emphasized is the pursuit of happiness. And I wonder what you've seen as

sort of the darker side of that pursuit of happiness and how that relates to what we're going through

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